Brief Description: Continue working on the canopy fit.
We removed the canopy from the fuselage and started our attempts to bend the frame into tolerance. We had read of failed attempts of others on the internet. It takes a lot of force to bend the 4130 steel frame and there is a lot of springback. It's easily overbent and causes kinks which have to be repaired by cutting out the kink and rewelding an insert. Using your feet and the floor to bend seems like a sure way to catastrophe without anyway of knowing how much bend has occured.
I took a piece of MDF and traced the turtledeck mold line to have a reference for measuring the amount of bend in the aft bows. I put verticle lines about every 6" and them measured to the trace to determine if the turtledeck skin was symetrical. It was! I then knew that I could take measurements off the trace to determine the amount of attempted bend. All this looked right but I was to find out later that I should have a trace of the extended projection of the turtledeck skin at the point the frame is touching the roll bar at the rollers.
